Historians of women’s labor in the United States at firstlargely disregarded the story of

Historians of women’s labor in the United States at first

largely disregarded the story of female service workers

-women earning wages in occupations such as salesclerk.

domestic servant, and office secretary. These historians

(5) focused instead on factory work, primarily because it

seemed so different from traditional, unpaid “women’s

work” in the home, and because the underlying economic

forces of industrialism were presumed to be gender-blind

and hence emancipatory in effect. Unfortunately, emanci-

(10) pation has been less profound than expected, for not even

industrial wage labor has escaped continued sex segre-

gation in the workplace.

To explain this unfinished revolution in the status of

women, historians have recently begun to emphasize the

(15) way a prevailing definition of femininity often etermines

the kinds of work allocated to women, even when such

allocation is inappropriate to new conditions. For instance,

early textile-mill entrepreneurs, in justifying women’s

employment in wage labor, made much of the assumption

(20) that women were by nature skillful at detailed tasks and

patient in carrying out repetitive chores; the mill owners

thus imported into the new industrial order hoary stereo-

types associated with the homemaking activities they

presumed to have been the purview of women. Because

(25)women accepted the more unattractive new industrial tasks

more readily than did men, such jobs came to be regarded

as female jobs.And employers, who assumed that women’s

“real” aspirations were for marriage and family life.

declined to pay women wages commensurate with those of

(30) men. Thus many lower-skilled, lower-paid, less secure jobs

came to be perceived as “female.”

More remarkable than the origin has been the persistence

of such sex segregation in twentieth-century industry. Once

an occupation came to be perceived as “female.” employers

(35) showed surprisingly little interest in changing that percep-

-tion, even when higher profits beckoned. And despite the

urgent need of the United States during the Second World War

to mobilize its human resources fully, job segregation by sex

characterized even the most important

(40) war industries. Moreover, once the war ended, employers

quickly returned to men most of the “male” jobs that

women had been permitted to master.

According to the passage, job segregation by sex in the United States was______

A．greatly diminlated by labor mobilization during the Second World War

B．perpetuated by those textile-mill owners who argued in favor of women’s employment in wage labor

C．one means by which women achieved greater job security

D．reluctantly challenged by employers except when the economic advantages were obvious

E．a constant source of labor unrest in the young textile industry